HP consumer products are literal garbage. The only good thing that comes out of HP is their commercial server equipment.

Lenovo won’t let you down for Linux. I’ve run Linux on thinkpads for years, multiple generations. I used to work at IBM, so I had em for work. Rock solid machines, I still run with them today (just the newer generations).

I’ll assume that was meant to be WiFi. It’s indeed one of the few components that’s easy to swap (a new one is about 30€), as long as it’s accessible (it usually is).

but when it comes to linux hardware vendors like those, for me at least, it’s hard to know which ones are good and which ones are bad or unknowns.

You hit the nail on the head with that remark. Because, quite frankly, it’s hard for all of us; I would love to read reviews done by Notebookcheck (or similarly high-profile reviewers), unfortunately that’s simply not the case. In this case, you would have to scrape whatever knowledge you can find about these specific devices (and their vendors) before judging for yourself if it’s worth taking the risk.

The reason, why I’m personally fond of NovaCustom and Star Labs, is because they’re known to contribute back significantly to the open-source community; same applies to System76, Purism and Tuxedo. I didn’t name any these in my previous post, because none of them seemed to be sufficiently affordable.

i did look into the lower grade star labs and there was something about the processors they used… i did a little reading and they got poor marks for being uber slow or something. i could have misinterpreted things though.

If it’s about the processor being slow, then I’m not surprised. It’s from Intel’s N-series, which is somewhat of a spiritual successor to Intel’s Celeron and Pentium lines. Both of which are known to be not powerful. And for that price you shouldn’t expect a lot more, but I agree that an i3 (or something else with similar processing power) should have been possible at that price-range.

They make computers designed for linux, Pop OS is their default operating system for the computers they make

Welcome to Linux! Every hardware runs everything. Its not Mac or Android. Old Devices work always, as the drivers already exist. Only reeeally old stuff gets thrown out of the kernel.

Thinkpad T430’s have a pretty high price on Ebay currently, I have one and its a great laptop, nice keyboard, Coreboot/Heads/Libreboot/1vyrain custom BIOS all run. But it is a really old Laptop.

Bought a Clevo MZ41 on Ebay, will attempt to flash coreboot. Was not pricey too.

Try Thinkpads, Dell, Hp. Normally older Acer or Asus too. If you find a laptop with

• good 1080p display
• good keyboard in your language/ you dont care about stickers
• good battery life
• everything normal broken, not completely old

Just search for “Linux MODEL” and you will probably find some reports.

For new hardware you want a recent Distro, Fedora (try Kinoite! ublue.it), OpenSuse Tumbleweed (try Kalpa) or EndeavorOS for easy Arch, are all good. Maybe avoid ubuntu, or use something like PopOS or TuxedoOS, which are better versions of Ubuntu, with newer packages and less annoying crap like Snap.

I am not sure if you already use Linux, but some general tips:

• try to use Flatpaks from Flathub as much as possible. They are already often officially supported and have less bugs. Also the apps are isolated from your system, so they are more up to date, dont break your system, keep system upgrades small, and they have privacy advantages
• use a Distro that supports Wayland very well. X11 is stupidly old and will be completely unsupported in a few years. Its already dead since a few years, as nothing changes.
• try an “immutable”, image based Distribution like Fedora Atomic (Kinoite (KDE), Silverblue (Gnome)) or Opensuse Kalpa (KDE) or Aeon (Gnome). They are simply modern, stable, resettable and your changes are transparent.
• if you want to do any crazy stuff like code, install apps with many dependencies, do it in a Distrobox. You can install apps normally, but they are still not bloating your system. If you dont need them, delete the Distrobox and your system is clean again. This goes especially for strange University etc. software that needs to be installed with some script or something.
• use a root Distrobox if you need things like USB
• use fish as your normal shell, simply by editing the Terminals “open command”. That way your shell in the Distroboxes has a different configuration, fish looks nice and colorful and has stuff like autocompletion.
• do backups of your system and your data. Just do that always, on an extra drive. It saves so much horror of losing everything, if a drive breaks or your laptop gets stolen or whatever. If you want Cloud backups, use Cryptomator and any cloud you want.
• use Syncthing, maybe disable global discovery for LAN only, for syncing your data between two or more specific devices.
• use soundbound, SoundCloud Downloader (Firefox Addon) and youtube downloaders as long as they work. Download all of your music to not be dependend on those companies
• try waydroid for Android apps on Linux. Use F-Droid basic as the application store, and check for “list of f-droid repositories” and add some.

You can check the hardware compatibility list in here. The level support begin with Ships Fedora, Supports Fedora, and Fedora Friendly.

You’ll be fine just get whatever has best price to performance nvidia intel or amd generally amd gpus are best for linux because of there driver support but its still shit a good exanple of this is the r7 370s last drivers being made in 2015

Honestly people over do it with the Nvidia complaints.

Nvidia provides a rock solid driver for Linux. If you are a general consumer it works really really well and it’s easy to install.

Here’s the actual historical issue people have with Nvidia on Linux: it’s a closed source binary which is contradictory to the ethos of Linux.

But he’s the rub, Nvidia open sourced some shit this year, not all of it, but they’re becoming more open about the GPU drivers. But shitting on Nvidia is a hard habit to break lol

Yeah, obviously the ones they sell with Linux pre-installed support Linux perfectly, but that’s like 5 out of their 20 laptops. It would be shitty if they didn’t. People tend to buy a model with Windows preloaded and then install Linux on it though. Even though I used to work for Disney+ as a Linux System Engineer, which runs entirely on Linux, I had to fight with the helldesk to get a laptop that runs Linux, they would only support Windows and MacBooks. I told them straight up that I didn’t need their support and I was able to figure out things on my own. It took me about 5 months to get the Lenovo Carbon X1, granted this was during the end of the first year of COVID.

One of my coworkers had a Dimension or whatever the “base level” laptops are and absolutely hates it. He said it ran like shit but couldn’t get another one.

It depends on what you expect your laptop to do. 8gb ram and a 2.4ghz i5 quad core processor is acceptable for almost any computing task out side of playing heavier load video games or specialty IT stuff like LLMs or cryptomining. If your main concern is video games go with the base model steam deck. Also, when you go check out listing for used think pads you will find they contain wildly different specs even if they are the same series. This is because the companies that bought them new X years ago spend some sweet corporate cash on decking them out with the at-the-time highest end options ordered custom from lenovo, and then they throw them in the literal trash a decade later. Some people who dig them out and resell on facebook don’t know a thing about computers and think they are only worth the base options used price.